The warehouse is equipped with three autonomous trolleys and two mobile collaborative robots from KUKA for transporting parts between production facilities and collaborating with humans. Basic logistics shall be handled through a Fleet Management system designed to manage autonomous vehicles performing intralogistics operations.
Cooperative control of mobile robots in logistics has been developed for the situation when they share an operating space such as a crossroad. Whenever two mobile robots meet at a crossroad, one of them stops because of its safety features to avoid crash. Often a manual intervention of an operator is needed to restart the robot after the common space is cleared. The presented solution introduces an independent control layer that monitors the position of the robots and intentionally stops one of them before entering the common space if the other robot is already in. After the common space is cleared the robot, which was stopped, is commanded automatically to continue its operation.
Localization system RTLS by Siemens is used to monitor the position of the mobile robots, KUKA KMP mobile robots are used to perform the demonstration. The interface of the control layer allows visualization over a web page and integration to other logistics / manufacturing planning and control systems. It also allows connecting other types of mobile vehicles.